Trump’s Agents Brutally Arrested Him On Video. Now He’s Speaking Out.

Orbin Mauricio Henríquez Serrano, like many immigrants living in the Twin Cities, was scared to go into work on Jan. 11. Immigration agents had been marauding through Minneapolis and St. Paul for weeks, targeting neighborhoods with large immigrant populations and demanding papers from people based on their accents. Four days earlier, one of them had killed Renee Good. But several of his co-workers at a local tavern, where he was a cook and assistant manager, had called out, so he felt like he had to go in.

First, he had to get gas.

He stopped at a Speedway in St. Paul, bought a Red Bull, and sat in his car as it filled up. That’s when he noticed the immigration agents surrounding his vehicle. He knew as soon as he saw them that they wanted to arrest him, all too aware of the seemingly random ambushes by masked agents across the region recently.

“They didn’t know who I was, really — until, I think, they scanned the license plates of my vehicle,” he recalled in Spanish.

Millions of people have seen what happened next.

Henríquez Serrano only remembers pieces of it, before and after agents pressed him against the ground until he lost consciousness. They asked if he was a citizen, and he said he would not answer questions. He tried to call a lawyer, figuring the agents would not violate his private property to make an arrest. But they shattered his window and squeezed themselves inside his Jeep Cherokee to wrench him out.

I was about 25 feet away, close enough to see Greg Bovino, the roving Border Patrol commander now assigned to the Twin Cities who frequently targets gas stations, barking orders at bystanders and journalists to “back up!”

Henríquez Serrano remembers one agent hitting his hand with a small hammer — potentially the same one they used to break his window — and others calling him an “asshole” in Spanish. The next thing he remembers is waking up in the back of an unmarked van. He saw the protesters lined up outside the Whipple Federal Building, where agents detained him. He was surprised at how many Latino immigration agents there were, and how rude and unhelpful they were.

Video of Henríquez Serrano’s limp body being carried into a federal agent’s vehicle led many people, including his own sister, Consuelo, to worry that he had died.

The next morning, he said, his hands and feet were put in shackles, which stayed on for 11 hours. He and other detainees were taken to the airport, where they boarded a plane for Texas. There, they were taken to the infamous tent camp known as “Camp East Montana,” one of several “Alligator Alcatraz” knockoffs around the country. Multiple people have died there since December, including in one case that has been ruled a homicide.

It wasn’t until then, two days after his arrest, that he was able to speak to Consuelo and tell her, and the world, that he had survived.

“He only managed to tell me that he is very injured,” she relayed to me, describing a call that lasted just a few seconds.

Henríquez Serrano spent over a week at the tent camp before he was shackled again and flown to Honduras, where he was born. When he spoke to HuffPost last week, he still had a cough that he’d picked up at the immigration jail.

Everything at the camp was terrible, he said. “Hygiene — there is none.”

“If there were a pandemic in this place, everyone would die because there is no way to be isolated from others,” he said. “There is no ceiling for the individual cells, just one roof for all the cells.”

He said he was never able to speak to an attorney. His only visit to a somewhat shoddy clinic — “I don’t think that’s an accurate word for what that was,” he said — in the facility resulted in some cream and a handful of pills, presumably Tylenol. Henríquez Serrano believed he may have serious damage to tendons around his right knee. He’s working to get an MRI in Honduras now.

“I never had adequate medical attention,” he said, noting that guards “treated me roughly in the areas where I was injured” after his arrest.

Henríquez Serrano said he never spoke to an actual ICE agent or any other representative of the U.S. government during his entire time at Camp East Montana. Like many ICE detention facilities, the immigration jail is privately run and staffed by contractors. He said he would have tried to make a case to stay in the United States legally if he’d been able to.

In fact, he said, he’d tried to apply for asylum in 2019, during the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which required applicants to wait for U.S. court dates while staying south of the border. He planned to make a case that he needed refuge in the United States from violent gangs in Honduras, who he said tried to recruit him before he fled the country. But he was kidnapped in Mexico, and his family paid $14,000 for his freedom, he said. After that, he acknowledged, he crossed the border.

He’d come to the United States in search of a quiet, stable life — and he’d succeeded for six years. He felt he could walk the streets here without looking over his shoulder, a change from Honduras. He spent his free time exercising, playing “FIFA” and “Grand Theft Auto” and cheering on Minnesota United Football Club. (“God willing,” he said, he’ll be able to go to a Minnesota United game one day.)

“My life was work, spending time with my family, and that’s it,” he said.

He had no criminal record in the United States or his home country, he said — aside from a speeding ticket he got a few years ago in Arkansas.

After his arrest, the Trump administration asserted that he had been subject to a 2020 deportation order. Henríquez Serrano said he had never been made aware of such an order, including when he was pulled over for speeding in 2022.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a detailed list of questions. Instead, spokesperson Tricial McLaughlin said, seemingly in reference to Henríquez Serrano’s arrest, “Authority under USC 1357 and of course reasonable suspicion are protected by the U.S. Constitution.” She denied that ICE engages in racial profiling and said that ICE facilities “comply with performance-based national detention standards” — including, she added, “the best healthcare than many aliens have received in their entire lives.”

Henríquez Serrano said he’s relieved to be out of detention, but he’s worried about his safety now that he’s back in Honduras, after so many years living in the United States, the country he had called home.

He wanted people in the United States to know what he knows — that the immigrants President Donald Trump is smearing as criminals actually feed them, build their homes and contribute to society. And he said he was heartened to see people protesting the immigration enforcement surge.

“They are the voice that we Latinos have to suppress because of fear,” he said.

Ashford King provided translation for this story.